


Don't Look Back

by Jarrn



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Injured Character, No Romance, No pairing - Freeform, Who does that, blighters are rude, dont worry jacob will save the day, who even lives in a train though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 09:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17506103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jarrn/pseuds/Jarrn
Summary: She’s a Blighter only through the colors she wears. She does not care for their rivalries, their wars, their goals. She followed her brother here, and now she will follow him beyond this world.They leave her for dead and she waits, staring up at a darkening sky. Before the cool slide of death can find her, the Rooks do.





	Don't Look Back

 

She’s slammed against the wall, rough stone and wood bite at her skin and drive the air out of her lungs. A hand is fisted into the front of her tunic.

“I’m tired,” Dorian growls, “of you disobeying _very simple_ orders.”

He slams her up against the wall again. She stares down at the rocks beneath their feet, blood slowly licking its way down her temple from a knock to the head. She knows he is wrong, she did not disobey any orders. But she says nothing; disputing what he says will only making him angrier.

She learned that a long time ago.

She’s a Blighter only through the colors she wears. She does not care for their rivalries, their wars, their goals. She followed her brother here, posing as his younger brother – she knows what atrocities men are capable of towards women, so she bound her chest and cut her hair – but now her brother is dead. She tried to leave, tried to get out, but the Blighter reach is far and she has learned all too well the consequences.

She is considered untrustworthy – a Blighter that tried to leave. They don’t kill her. But they want to.

Now he is accusing her of something she did not do. She was nowhere near the street where the Rooks slaughtered his Blighters. But she will not argue. She cannot.

He has come so close to killing her through the last two years, him and this cursed gang. _Payment_ they say. _Compensation_ , they whisper. _For trying to leave_ , they laugh.

She doesn’t think she will survive this time. 

They leave her bleeding from a knife wound to her side, blade still jammed between her ribs. She’s crumpled awkwardly by the docks where no one will find her. She cannot find the energy to care, lying there as blood stains the ground beneath her, as her side screams. She has been bloodied so many times, left bruised and beaten.

It has never been this bad, she thinks.

It is almost a relief.

She will see her brother again, her parents, and she will finally escape this wretched place. She watches the grey clouds sway above her, threaded with the shrouded shapes of cackling gulls. She thinks it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

She shudders, teeth chattering, it is so _cold_. The trembling reignites the inferno slashed across her ribs.

She barely has the energy to gasp as fire roars up her side.

She can’t breathe, the cold and the fire have stolen her breath from her lungs. She loses track of time, lying there in the damp and grey.

The world is blurred around her when she feels the vibration of running feet, blearily thinks the Blighters are coming back to torture her some more, wills her heart to give out faster.

Shadows move over her – she flinches, barely a twitch as her muscles refuse to obey - as she stares at the blurred sky. Darkness creeps on the edges of her vision.

“Look at this. A little lost Blighter.” The shadows above her laugh raucously. She doesn’t think it is very funny.

Something nudges her side – a boot, she thinks blearily – and the blaze she had nearly forgotten about roars back to life. She’s on fire, she thinks. She is burning. It is freezing and she burns like coal.

She gasps, dragging in a rasping breath through chattering teeth.

Someone is speaking, shouting, and the noises echo like the drumbeats of her heart.

The shadows above her move, like black birds in flight, twisting and turning and darting. They grow larger, clearer, and she shudders. She does not want the birds to take her. She cannot fly and they will surely drop her.

She reaches to push them away, to fend them off, but her limbs are encased in ice and frozen to the ground. She despairs. They will take her, fight over her corpse, and swallow her whole. Her eyes flutter shut, her anguish dragging them down.

A voice rumbles from her right, too close and too loud, and her eyes flash open with a gasp that chokes her. She tries to turn to look, see who – or what, and she thinks of those giant birds – is speaking. Her neck creaks as she tries to force it to move, but it too is made of ice. Her eyes roll to the side, she just wants to _see_ , but she only catches a glimpse of green and gold and a hand coming towards her.

A pressure on her jaw, a hand gripping her face, forces her head to the side, cracking the ice that has trapped her. Her heart quakes for a moment, terrified of what she might find. Her eyes shut of their own accord, but a thickening of the pressure on her jaw forces her to open them.

A face blurs into view, fuzzy and full of static, a jaw, a nose, eyes and a hat. Green and gold and brown. His mouth moves slowly, and she stares muzzily at him. She’s fairly certain she knows that face, and she knows she’s dead. Jacob Frye does not go easy on the Blighters, none of his Rooks do, but he fights like the devil and even his name strikes fear into lowly Blighters like herself.

He frowns, gives her jaw a little shake and, when she doesn’t respond, slaps at her cheek. The muted roar in her ears dims a little bit, and her gaze must sharpen because his mouths moves. He repeats himself.

“Don’t close your eyes, lad.”

With the clearing of the world around her also came a sharpening of the blaze racing across her abdomen. She gasps, tries to shove a hand across the inferno to quench it, but her arm does nothing more than flop weakly against the ground.

“You might survive this yet. Don’t close your eyes.”

His fuzzy shape moves away.

She feels hands on her, undoing her tunic and coat and a minute later, frigid air reaches her skin. The hands hesitate, a moment of stillness. One, two, three heartbeats.

The blurred face is back, this time directly above her. 

“You’re a lass.” The voice states. She gazes at him, rasping breaths dragging through her throat. She wonders if he is staring at her shorn hair, scarred and muddy face, the scarf across her throat.

“Don’t close your eyes.” He repeats. Then he disappears into the grey above her.

Rain begins to splatter against her skin. She barely feels it through the chill that’s creaking inside her. It pools in the hollows of her skin, runs ragged drips along her nose, across her parted lips. She wonders if she might drown like this.

A particularly persistent bead of rain trails towards her throat and she chokes, back arching as fire sprints through her veins.

The ice vanishes in the wake of that fire, the world sharpened into a focus so piercing it _cuts_.

She scrabbles for her side, where the agony and fire boil together into a tempest. Her hands fumble against another pair, shoving them away, rain making them slick. She lashes out with a knee, a foot, before a vice-like grip clamps around both legs. Her fingers swipe a line of acid across her ribs as she fights and she gasps, back curving off the ground once again. She glimpses her red-stained hands for just a second before they are grabbed and thrust towards someone else.

Her back bows once again as she attempts to curl in on herself, but there are hands on her shoulders now, and hands at her legs and it is a futile motion.

She is trapped as an inferno roars around her and she chokes on her panic, the pounding of her heart in her throat.  

The blurry figure – _Jacob Frye_ , her mind whispers, in terror, in hope - is above her once again, shielding her from the falling rain. He shouts something, but it is lost in the raging maelstrom twisting within her.

The figure leans down, shouts again, cards a hand through her short hair.

“If you want to live, lass, _stop_ _moving_!”

He says something else, eyes raised to something behind her. Another figure kneels down, replies, but the sound is lost in the yelp she emits when her side suddenly flashes white-hot and angry. The drag of the knife pulling through her muscle and skin chokes her. She tries to grab at her side again, but her arms are held firm by two sets of hands to either side of her.

The leader of the Rooks moves away slightly, back to her side, where fury rages hot and heavy, but his fingers linger a moment longer, sliding smooth and slow across her brow.

Another pair of hands settle on either side of her face, fingers brushing her jaw, palms tickling the edges of her ears.

A bloodied knife moves into view, passed from one man to another, and for a stuttering second she thinks they’re going to finish her off. But she recognizes the knife, it’s _hers_ , the one they just drug out of her broken body. Jacob Frye – _Jacob Frye_ – turns and looks at her again. This close, she can see the searching flicker in his eyes.

She fights upwards once again, she needs to _see_ , but the fingers cradling her head tighten and effortlessly keep her down. She gives in willingly, easily, too exhausted and pained. She is tired. Tired of fighting, tired of this place, these people, the Blighters and the Rooks and _London_ , pain and rage and constant grief and fear. She is tired of this _war._ It has taken so much of her, her brother, her happiness, her _life_. 

Figures surround her, dark and wild, forcing her still and she should be afraid.

And yet.

She feels inexplicably calm, in a way she can’t explain, not now, bleeding out in the dirty streets, bloodied by her own knife. She will die, or she won’t, but that someone tried to save her, in the end, is enough to still her.

Her heart still pounds in her throat, her chest aches, and exhaustion lines the world. Fingers trace gentle lines along her jaw.

 

 

She awakens later on a bed in a train, with strangers hovering like ghosts around her. She’s swaddled in bandages, mouth tasting like ash.

She languishes for nearly a week there. She fights a fever that they are certain will kill her. Her strength wanes before returning with a vengeance. There is a man there for nearly all of her fever-addled waking, gazing at her with steady eyes, letting her grip his hand when she thinks her bones will tremble right out of her skin. She learns his name is Henry, and he is in charge of this place. He specifically does not say Rooks, and she wonders about that, but she cannot imagine ever asking. He does not speak to her much, but his hands are gentle and slow when he changes her bandages and she should be embarrassed, he is a _man_ and she is a _woman_ , but she cannot even raise the energy to care.

He tries to talk to her once, ask her what happened, but she hunches her shoulders and clenches her fists and he only sighs. He ruffles her cropped hair congenially, before traipsing out of the room they’ve sequestered her in.

She meets some of the other Rooks, they stop by occasionally, ostensibly working but more than willing to entertain her. They are too trusting, she thinks, she is their _enemy_. Maybe it is her gender that endears her to them, maybe it is the betrayal that is so plain upon her skin.

They make her laugh with their taunts, their jokes, and they ignore the stuttered shadows lurking on her face. They move slow and careful around her, and she appreciates it and she hates it. She knows they saw the bruises, the ones in the shape of fists, defensive marks across her arms, from getting hit but not fighting back.

She does not speak to them much, but they do not seem to expect her too.

It is nearly a week after she wakes when they stop forcing her to rest. The wound is stitched neatly, tightly, a smiling mouth stretching across her ribs, and it doesn’t pain her much anymore, as long as she moves carefully.

 _Don’t go anywhere but the common areas_ she is told. She does not know what that means, what the common areas _are_ , so she sticks to the only places she _knows_ she is allowed – the room she woke up in, the kitchen, and the hallways between. She cannot imagine the trouble she would be in if she accidentally went somewhere she wasn’t supposed to and she trembles with the thought of it.

She prowls the halls like a wraith. She skirts the daylight hours, pacing through the darkness in the stillness of the night.

Eventually, she meets Jacob Frye.

She is tucked away in one of the far seats in the dining car. It is dark and silent, and she gazes out at the rain falling from the sky. The moon casts strange silhouettes across her face, silvery and smooth.

Jacob strides in, soft and silent, but pauses when he sees the Blighter girl curled up on a seat in the shadows. She does not know he is there, and he thinks back to what he’s heard about her from his Rooks. _Quiet_ they say. _Nervous._ _Scared_. They tell him what he suspected when he first lifted up her shirt in the rain and saw bruises in the shape of fists. _She flinches when you shout. She shakes when you get too close_.

He backs out of the room. Then, he heavies his footsteps, drags his feet across the floor just slightly. She is looking at him when he crosses back over the threshold. Recognition widens them for a second, before she ducks her head and gazes at the table before her.

“Thank you,” she says and her voice is quiet and dusty and he has to strain to even hear her over the rain.

“You,” she swallows, he sees her throat bob, “you helped save my life. I am grateful.” She darts a glance back up, before dropping it again, hunching her shoulders slightly.

“What kind of gentleman would I be, if I let a lass like you die on those filthy docks?” He shoots her a teasing grin, hoping to put her at ease. The fear that flashes across her face has him reconsidering.

Silence rains down upon them.

“Why?” She eventually asks, then immediately looks like she regrets it.

“Why what?”

The silence stretches on. He does not think she will break it, but he is surprised.

“I was a Blighter, bleeding out in the street.”

“So why did I save you?” He muses. “We saw the Blighters leaving, right before we found you. So either you weren’t a Blighter at all, or you were a Blighter with a story to tell. I guess I was right.”

He looks at her, her gaze staring steadily somewhere over his left shoulder.

“You were right,” she echoes softly.

“Thank you again for saving my life, Mr. Frye.” She bids him a quiet goodnight, skirts widely around him, and disappears into the shadows of the hall.

The next time he sees her, he’s stopping by her room, looking for Henry. He finds him there, along with one of his female Rooks, unwrapping the bandages around her side. The girl sits cross-legged on the edge of the bed, her back to the door. She looks up as he walks in, throwing a nervous glance over her shoulder. Henry and the Rook, Bethany is her name and she is the daughter of a nurse, look at him curiously as he crosses the room.

He ignores their gaze, staring at the girl on the bed. He had known. He had _known_ , when he had knelt there in the pouring rain next to her bleeding body, when they had pulled off her shirt and found a bound chest and so many bruises and scars that it had startled him. He had _known_. And yet it still surprises him. The bruises are mostly faded to mottled greens and browns, but the scars are still there. Some pink and new, others white and weathered. They tell a story, one that he does not think he wants to know. Her newest injury juts out like a beacon, red and angry with a line of black stitching it closed. It slashes across her ribs the spread of his hand, a macabre grin that nearly killed her. He’s still staring when a white bandage neatly wraps around it, blocking it from view as Henry and the Rook finish their task.

Bethany leaves quickly, nodding at Jacob as she leaves. His eyes follow her out, watch her close the door, before he turns back to the two before him.

Henry places a hand on his arm, says quietly, “She will go back.”

“You can’t be serious!” His disbelief has him shooting a look at the Blighter woman before him. She rises from the bed at his shout, standing silently and nervously, tapping her fingers at her side.

 “They tried to kill you.” He says flatly. Henry’s hand tightens on his arm.

“I know.” She says to the ground beneath her feet.

“And you would go back to them.”

“Yes.” She says to her shaking hands in front of her.

“ _Why_?” He demands, bewildered and angry and hurt.

“Because my brother loved them.” She whispers to her feet. The flinching around her eyes gives away that story, so he does not ask.

“But you do not. So why?” he asks again.

She does not answer.

He makes to storm over to her, demand to know _why_ , why she would go back to those that tried to kill her, instead of staying with the ones that saved her, but Henry tightens his grip on his arm.

Jacob swings to him, fire burning in his gaze, and hisses.

“They tried to kill her, and she wants to run back to them.”

Henry lowers his voice, darting a look to the woman in question. They are just barely out of earshot, by the door.

“Some people,” he starts, in that overly calm voice of his, “especially ones who have been hurt, feel that it is better to dance with the devil they know than the one that they don’t.”

“So she thinks we’re what? Like them?” the male Frye demands.

“She thinks there is a chance that you could be worse.” Henry answers.

Jacob rounds back to the woman they saved.

“We pulled this out of you.” He tosses a knife on the table beside her. She recognizes it. It’s a Blighter knife, _her_ knife. There’s a stain on the blade. She looks away.

Her foot taps nervously in the silence.

“Look,” he says finally, running his hands impatiently through his hair. “You don’t have to talk or nothing, I’m not demanding answers. But you show up bleeding, _dying_ , in Blighter colors, _your_ knife between your ribs. And now you want to go back to them. They left you to _die_.”

He’s angry at her, she thinks. Angry and annoyed and it’s like the Blighters all over again. They were always _so mad_ at her, even the sound of her breathing could set them off.

She hunches her shoulders, ducks her head, and trembles. Her side still aches, a rolling burn, and the bruises she had before are only just fading into yellows.

It’s Jacob’s turn to fidget, and she flinches at the movement.

“Jacob.” Henry warns. 

She takes a steadying breath.

 “Two years ago,” she whispers, “I tried to leave.”

“They didn’t kill me. But they wanted to.”

“What changed?” He cuts in. She gives him a look.

“Your Rooks killed some of his men. They could not hurt the Rooks, so they hurt me.”

 “Did they ever realize you were a girl, when they were beating on you?” Jacob asks. He clenches his fists.

“They would have done far worse if they had,” she whispers.

The silence is heavy, suffocating.

He lets out a breath then tries to soften his voice.

“Do you want to stay here?”

She does not answer, she cannot. Her words stick in her throat, her heart pounds a stuttering beat.

She does not want to go back, she thinks. Not ever. She does not say it. They saved her life, let her stay here, and she does not wish to burden them any further. The thought is like lightning to her heart, but she shoves it down. 

She ducks her head, stare piercing into the carpet beneath their feet. Jacob takes that as the affirmative that it isn’t.

“You…want to go back?” he queries, mouth hard and she thinks that once again, she has made him angry.

“No,” she whispers, “no – I just. I-“  and she stops. Her heart is pounding, her hands are shaking, and she doesn’t even know why she is so afraid.

She would rather she have died, then go back.

Jacob casts a bewildered look towards Henry standing silently at his side.

“Hey, it’s okay. You can stay here if you want. In fact, I think we would prefer if you stayed here. With us. Not them.”

She looks at him uncertainly, then slides her gaze to Henry. He nods at her.

 

 

She exchanges her red coat for green, drapes a yellow scarf around her neck, and Jacob declares her presentable. She is forced into the company of the rest of the Rooks in the evenings, their uncertainty about her abating, their riotous laughing and jokes infectious. She feels herself unwind, slowly, and she does not flinch quite so much anymore. She throws back taunts of her own, unsurely at first, then with growing confidence. The first time they startle a laugh out of her, a hush drops over the assembled Rooks, before a greater shout rings out and they cheer.

It takes her a couple months to gather enough courage to leave the safety of the train, to journey out into the world. She shakes like a leaf the first time, but she’s got a contingent of green-coats with her and the Fryes beside her and there’s nothing in the world that could get past them.

She laughs at a stupid joke the Rook next to her spouts off.

She thinks she may be home.


End file.
